"CanWest : "Chipeur's argument foreshadows a possibly drastic response from the Conservatives should they be turfed from power. He suggests that Conservatives may not readily accept the governor-general's decision should she refuse the prime minister's request for an election."
Just five days ago we heard this same dismissal of the Governor General from John Baird in an interview with Don Newman when he said - twice! - "We're going over the heads of the politicians and the governor general directly to the Canadian people."
Several commenters have taken Dawg to task for either fear-mongering or taking Chipeur too seriously but so-con Chipeur has a history of laying groundwork for the Cons through his Republican contacts, some of which follows :
New York Observer : (additional bracketed info - mine)
"From: Paul Weyrich[co-founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:38 AM
To: Bob Thompson[a staffer at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation]
Subject: Message from Canada
Importance: High
Please get this message to the Stanton, Family Forum and Wednesday lunch groups:I received a call last night from Gerald Chipeur, an important figure in Canada’s Conservative Party. He told me that Conservatives are with-in striking distance of electing an outright majority in Parliamentary elections Monday.
He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the USA in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives.
Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory. Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate.
Many thanks."
When contacted by Canadian Press about the email, Weyrich denied any personal involvement but later on his website, he bragged about his "small victory" in the Canadian elections.
This August, Chipeur, past Alberta chair of Republicans Abroad, teamed up with the American Chamber of Commerce to hold a $1000-a-plate fund-raising campaign for John McCain for the 80,000 Americans who live and work in Calgary.
Canadian citizens' proceeds went to Friends of Science, Tim Ball's oil industry-funded anti-Kyoto "charity", whose funding was laundered through the University of Calgary by Harper's buddy, Prof. Barry Cooper, before the U of C put a stop to it.
When Friends of Science ran ads which attacked the previous Liberal government's support for the Kyoto Protocol, pledging "to have a major impact on the next election," Chipeur acted as their lawyer in the ensuing investigation by Elections Canada.Chipeur is also credited with introducing Republican Frank Sensenbrenner to Canadian embassy officials at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, attended by Stockwell Day, Chipeur's choice for coalition PM in 2000. Sensenbrenner had previously attended Reform Party conventions and Stockwell Day insisted he be hired by the Canadian Embassy over their objections.
Sensenbrenner was subsequently accused of the Naftagate leak. which sought to damage Barack Obama's credibility during the Democratic primaries, but an internal investigation by Harper's deputy minister failed to provide any evidence.
The Star : "In failing to plumb the leak, the report effectively protects the ruling party from awkward questions. With an election not far in the future, voters might reasonably ask if Conservatives put this country's seminal relationship [with Obama] at risk to give Republicans a helping hand."
One might also reasonably ask if the Cons' continuing ties to the Republican Party through Gerald Chipeur put the rest of us at risk.
Cross-posted, more or less, at Creekside
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